Fowles on the novel's multiple uses

I try to avoid narrow, limiting definitions of what literature is, what it can be used for, and how one ought to approach it, for two clear reasons. First, approaching literature is primarily an individual activity, and the great diversity of humanity must call for multiple subjective approaches to literature. And second, there are so many potentials for literature, it seems harmful to try and limit those uses.

I found this passage from John Fowles' "Notes on an Unfinished Novel" particularly articulate on my thoughts:

"[Alain Robbe-Grillet's] key question: Why bother to write in a form whose great masters cannot be surpassed? The fallacy of one of his conclusions--that we must discover a new form to write in if the novel is to survive--is obvious. It reduces the purpose of the novel to the discovery of new forms, whereas its other purposes--to entertain, to satirize, to describe new sensibilities, to record life, to improve life, and so on--are clearly just as viable and important."

Fowles was an innovative novelist with a strong grip on manipulating form, particularly in The French Lieutenant's Woman. But it doesn't appear that Fowles considers innovation of form primary to his art (he suggests later in the same essay that his novels are "based on more or less disguised existentialist premises"). Indeed, there are purposes to the novel beyond innovating the form of the novel, and Fowles only describes a few.

Rube Cred

I collect sports cards: mostly football, but also basketball and a little bit of baseball. So when I was tooling around amazon.com searching for books, and discovered that Topps made a card of Fyodor Dostoevsky for its 2007 Allen & Ginter's set, I thought, "You know, if I'm not going to get a card of Fyodor Dostoevsky, what's the point of even collecting cards?"

The card came in the mail today--I danced around gleefully.

Reading "The Scarlet Letter"

Hawthorne's style
I consider Hawthorne one of the masters of the short story form, and his style in The Scarlet Letter is mostly the same. Yet a style that serves so well for 20 pages or so becomes a bit much over 200 or so.

Still, Hawthorne masterfully portrays the emotional, psychological, spiritual state of his main characters. Reading the book, I felt personally overwhelmed, weighed down. I felt the burden of the scarlet letter for Hester Prynne, the overbearing, heavy guilt and shame of Arthur Dimmesdale, and the spiritual hatred and corruption of Roger Chillingworth. In the text itself, Hawthorne portrays introspective oppression. I wanted to rip off the letter. I wanted Dimmesdale to throw off his burden and confess his actions. I wanted to run outside in the bright sunshine and move freely about.

Religion and Christ
The Scarlet Letter is much about religion, with much explicit religious discussion by the author and characters. Yet about half-way through the book, I became conscious that there had not been, and would not be, any direct mention of Jesus Christ. Which makes sense: the Puritan religion Hawthorne portrays in the book is a particularly oppressive, sin-obsessed, judgmental, unforgiving pseudo-christianity. There are many more references to the Old Testament than the New, and there are many references to judgment and Judgment. The story is in many ways about redemption and forgiveness, but in the society Hawthorne describes, such concepts are pushed to the background.

Roger Chillingworth
When I say I am a "moral reader," it is not because I think that it is the only way to read literature, nor that I think all readers should read this way (far from it). I only mean that when I read, there is a certain level of moral edification involved. I rarely read without being inspired to thought and consideration, not just of the text itself, but of how the text applies in my living life. I suppose that one could read a book like Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and not consider the issues of animal rights that are explicitly discussed in the novel; I, however, wouldn't want to. I read for direct engagement, and what I read causes me to think of myself and the world.

In Roger Chillingworth, I see a moral. He reminds me of the spiritual corruption that comes from unforgiving hatred. A challenge of a Christian pacifist is to be peaceable, to be forgiving, to actually let things go. The presence of a vengeful man like Roger Chillingworth does not provide me with a new idea; it does, however, provide me with a concrete reminder. To seek vengeance, to hold grudges, to refuse to try and forgive, is to corrupt oneself. To nurse a hatred, a perceived wrong, to feed it and build it, ruins oneself as much as it can ever ruin an enemy.

Stupid Summer Project: The Bookstore

Bookstore Employee: Did you take that book with you into the bathroom?
George: What do you want to hear?

George: May I ask, what do you read in the bathroom?
Jerry: I don't read in the bathroom.
George: Well aren't you something.

Comment: Some hammy lines in this episode. The opening is classic, as Kramer hangs out in Jerry's apartment while he's out. Kramer also has a nice zany scheme involving rickshaws and homeless people. For most of the past decade, I sympathized with George: why are they making him buy the book just because he took it into the bathroom? Just tonight, I realized that it's a good policy for bookstore's to forbid customers from taking books into the bathroom.

Uncle Leo is a great character: annoying, but in a mostly realistic way. He's not a favorite character of mine--he's in some episodes when he's not anything special. But sometimes, he's really funny, and his interactions with Jerry are very funny. I find his insistence on saying Hello to be pretty amusing. Jerry's prison dream, in which Leo has "Jerry Hello" tattooed on his fingers of course amuses me (amuses me enough to write "Jerry Hello" in pen on my fingers? Even right now, as an adult? Well, yes).

For the record, I read in the bathroom.

Sauk Centre, MN

Salem, MA

Sinclair Lewis Days

In Main Street, Sinclair Lewis absolutely skewers small towns. Naturally, Lewis' hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota names its summer booster festival "Sinclair Lewis Days."

Naturally, yours truly will be in Sauk Centre for Sinclair Lewis Days, as he is most summers.

(And yes, Sauk Centre High School's team nickname is the "Mainstreeters," often shorted to "Streeters").

Tolstoy's Shaky Premise

In The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy speaks of what he understands to be the "true meaning" of Christ's teachings, and he is very critical of those that he believes have misunderstood Christ. Included among those that misunderstood Christ, according to Tolstoy, are the earliest disciples in the New Testament.

But Tolstoy is working on a faulty foundation. What Tolstoy believes to be the "true meaning" of Christ is based on Christ's words as recorded by the disciples. Tolstoy claims scripture shows that these same disciples misunderstood Christ's teachings, and added all sorts of miraculous and supernatural material. But without those same disciples recording Christ's words, Tolstoy would not have a touchstone with which to find fault with those disciples.

It is fine if Tolstoy has a standard by which to determine which parts of the disciples' recorded writings he believes provide Christ's true teaching, and which parts are "miraculous" embellishments. It is rather frustrating, however, to read Tolstoy claiming to have the "true meaning" in his assessment, while criticizing others who "misunderstand" the text. In this way, Tolstoy disappoints me: he seems to be another person with a religious idea that uses some passages of a religious text to support what he already wants to believe, while dismissing those passages of the text that don't suit his purposes.

(But I'm in the middle of the book, so perhaps I'll have more to say later. I just had to articulate what I was finding frustrating in Tolstoy's content and tone in the book. And I'm not writing this from a religious standpoint, but an academic one: I find his argument problematic).

Tolstoy on Preemptive War?

Leo Tolstoy in The Kingdom of God is Within You:

"Besides, apologies for violence used against one's neighbor in defense of another neighbor from greater violence are always untrustworthy, because when force is used against one who has not yet carried out his evil intent, I can never know which would be greater--the evil of my act of violence or of the act I want to prevent. [...] I see that a man I know to be a ruffian is pursuing a young girl. I have a gun in my hand--I kill the ruffian and save the girl. But the death or the wounding of the ruffian has positively taken place, while what would have happened if this had not been I cannot know. And what an immense mass of evil must result, and indeed does result, from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what might happen."

Melville on Realism

Well, perhaps not Melville: at best we can say this is what is written by the narrator of The Confidence-Man. Whether it's Melville or simply Melville's narrator is not the point, however:

"Strange, that in a work of amusement, this severe fidelity to real life should be exacted by any one, who, by taking up such a work, sufficiently shows that he is not unwilling to drop real life, and turn, for a time, to something different. Yes, it is, indeed, strange that any one should clamour for the thing he is weary of; that any one, who, for any cause, finds real life dull, should yet demand of him who is to divert his attention from it, that he should be true to that dullness."

Though I agree with the dismissal of realism (a work's realism or lack thereof doesn't terribly concern me as a reader), I don't necessarily think we all turn to literature just to "drop real life" in favor of "amusement." We can turn to literature for a whole host of reasons, including, in my opinion, a deeper engagement with the world, not an escape from it. But I've also never forgotten that I read for pleasure, for amusement, for entertainment. What brings me pleasure in literature is of course not the same thing that brings another person pleasure in literature (a point that should be obvious, but I find too many people try to make their tastes into something other than their tastes). I read for many reasons, but not the least is that I want to enjoy myself.

Stupid Summer Project: The Burning

George: I think it's neat. You don't hear that much about God anymore.
Jerry: I hear things.

George: Whoa, back it up, back it up. Beep, Beep, Beep.

Comment: George has a lot of funny bits here--I picked these two because they're the ones I use in my own life. This episode has some other good deliveries from several characters.

Subjectivity

My Reading Declaration in Brief
Chapter Three: Subjectivity

"Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."
Bernard Shaw

If a work of art moves you, it does not matter if it moves no other person in the world. Even if the rest of the world despises that work of art, it should not mean any less to you. Your tastes are subjective, and so are the tastes of every other individual in the world.

Be wary of those that would make their subjective tastes into universal, absolute claims. And ignore anybody that would deny your individual experience with a work of art.